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Abstract

At present, a surprisingly wide variety of commentators and observers seem to
agree that Europeans are failing to tackle urgent policy challenges. As a result,
so the argument does, Europeans are falling further and further behind in an
increasingly competitive global race. Part of the reason, these commentators
believe, is the very nature of policy challenges that face European politicians,
policy-makers and citizens. Today’s policy problems are messy: underlying
causes are rarely known in full, the impacts are complex, and repercussions are
likely to spill over into other policy domains or jurisdictions. For this reason,
polities across the European continent feature divisive and protracted policy
conflicts about how to solve messy policy problems.
This thesis, then, sets out to understand the nature of this policy conflict
about messy policy problems in contemporary policy-making contexts. Conventionally,
the social sciences explain policy conflict in terms of a clash of
self-interested policy actors. Interest-based approaches, however, tell only part
of the story. In particular, they entirely omit the impact of ideas, knowledge and
world-views on conflicts about messy policy problems. Since, however, “ideas
matter” in policy-making, understanding of policy conflict requires analysing
the way policy actors clash over ideas and knowledge. This, then, gives rise
to the three general research questions of the thesis: is there a way to analyse
policy conflict in terms of ideas, knowledge and world-views; what insights into
conflict in contemporary European policy domains does such an ideas-based
approach offer; and what can the analysis of ideas-driven policy conflict tell
us about governance in European policy domains? The thesis addresses these
questions in two parts.
Part I of the thesis develops the conceptual framework for policy-oriented
discourse analysis designed to analyse conflict about messy policy problems.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide both the general conceptual backdrop as well as
introduce central concepts and tools used in the discourse-analytical framework.
Chapter 2 introduces the idea of the “differentiated polity” by discussing (predominantly
British) literature on policy networks and policy communities. The
differentiated polity — that is the realisation that contemporary policy-making
takes place in functionally segregated and specialised institutional network —
provides the institutional setting for the discourse-analytical framework. In
turn, Chapter 3 maintained that what goes on between policy actors in policy
networks and policy communities is fundamentally argumentative and conflictual.
By critically reviewing the so-called “Argumentative Turn in Policy
Analysis and Planning”, the chapter contributes a range of instruments, concepts
and tools that aim to analyse the impact of divergent ideas, knowledge
and world-views on contemporary policy processes. In Chapter 4, the thesis
discusses five different theories that explain policy processes in terms of
the interaction between ideas and institutions: the “Politology of Knowledge”
[Nullmeier and R¨ub, 1993], the “Multiple Streams Analysis” [Kingdon, 1984,
Kingdon, 1995], “Epistemic Communities” [Adler and Haas, 1992], “Advocacy
Framework Coalition” [Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993b], and “cultural theory”.
This chapter discusses and compares the strengths and weaknesses of each theory thereby identifying the key concepts and tools deployed in the discourseanalytical
conceptual framework.
Chapter 5 develops the conceptual framework for policy-oriented discourse
analysis by building in the synergies between different frameworks and theories
discussed in Part I of the thesis. The aim here is to capitalise on the mutual
strengths of each approach while avoiding the specific weaknesses. The
conceptual framework explains policy conflict over messy issues in terms of fundamentally
incompatible “perceptual lenses” or policy-frames. Policy actors
— networks of individuals that coalesce around a particular policy frame and
policy project — use these lenses or frames to make sense of complex and uncertain
policy problems. These policy frames, however, are fundamentally biased
because they emerge from and legitimate incompatible forms of social organisation.
Yet, since frames are irreducible, all knowledge about messy policy issues
is inherently relative and partial. The discourse-analytical framework uses the
“policy stories” method to reconstruct and compare arguments based on frames
in terms of coherent narratives. In this way, the chapter designs a discourseanalytical
framework capable of systematic analysing the scope, structure, and
impact of policy conflict about messy policy problems.
Part II of the thesis applies the discourse-analytical framework to three distinct
policy domains: European transport policy, environmental security and
pension reform. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 each feature a similar structure. In each
chapter, the analysis uses the policy stories method to gauge the scope of policy
conflict by comparing and juxtaposing contending policy stories about the
particular issue. Moreover, in each chapter the analysis also explores the structure
of policy conflict: here, each chapter scrutinises and compares the areas of
agreement and disagreement between each policy story. Last, the chapters also
examine the potential impacts of contending policy arguments. This involves
scrutinising the contending policy arguments for blind-spots and weaknesses.
Given that of policy arguments emerge from frames based in fundamentally
incompatible forms of social organisation, the chapters find that ideas-driven
policy conflict about complex, uncertain and transversal policy problems is endemic
and intractable. Thus, the case studies suggest that a wide scope of policy
conflict increases the likelihood of policy debate deteriorating into a “dialogue of
the deaf”. The inherent selectivity of policy frames, in turn, implies that a narrow
scope of policy conflict leaves policy processes vulnerable to unanticipated
consequences and policy failure. Chapter 9 applies the conceptual framework to
explore the impact of frame-based policy conflict on recent continental European
pension reform experiences. Counter to much of the social scientific literature,
the chapter shows how widening the scope of policy conflict in European pension
reform debates brought about structural changes in continental European
pension systems.
The conclusion reviews the argument, evidence and findings of the previous
chapters. The frame-based discourse analysis of Part II suggests that inevitable
and intractable policy conflict is a valuable, if volatile, resource for dealing with
messy policy problems. On the one hand, a wide scope of conflict maximises
the pool of potential policy solutions available to policy actors while minimising
unanticipated consequences. On the other hand, a responsive policy debate
ensures that contending policy actors profit from the critical potential of policy
conflict without descending into a dialogue of the deaf. Based on the application
of the discourse-analytical framework to three different policy domains, the conclusion outlines an agenda for future research. This research will revolve around
two main ideas. First, future research will explore the implication of a framebased
analysis of policy conflict for pluralist democracy in Europe. The analysis
in the empirical chapters of Part II suggests a positive relationship between policy
conflict, policy change and pluralist democracy. A future research agenda
will investigate how the discourse-analytical framework can be deployed to refurbish
pluralist theory and practice for contemporary policy processes. Second,
the future research agenda will also look at how the discourse-analytical framework
may be applied to overcoming or mitigating intractable policy conflict
about complex, uncertain and transversal policy problems.